Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Fitting the narrow view

There's a good editorial here by Roland Martin, a self-proclaimed evangelical Christian, ripping on Billy Graham and his ilk for "perverting" the Bible:

"What has happened over the last 30 years is the religious right has perverted the Bible to fit its narrow view of what Christians should pay attention to. Abortion and homosexuality. Nothing else matters."

He suggests that those on the political left may be following "Biblical values" just as much:

"The teachings of Jesus Christ are filled with examples of him helping the needy, feeding the hungry, healing the sick and wounded, and taking the haves to task for ignoring the have-nots."

As Heinlein once said, "The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can prove anything from it." I suspect the values that readers draw from it say more about the readers than the Bible itself. That being the case, I'm annoyed by fundamentalists who think their view of the world is somehow more valid than anyone else's, all because their beliefs are supposedly biblically based. I don't think they've "perverted" the Bible so much as used parts of it to support their views, while Martin uses other parts of it in the same way. It might be easier if we just skipped the Bible and stood proudly on what we believe, simply because we think it's right.